Car market takes a trashing with Greece’s collapse

It is easy to see why Angeliki Karitsa shut up shop this month and announced she would not be back until next month.

As marketing manager at Greece’s sole outlet selling Ferraris — the super car for the super rich — Karitsa has experienced some recent frustration: She has not sold a vehicle for almost two years.

“In early 2012, we sold a 458 Spider, but nothing since,” she said, within hours of beginning her monthlong summer break. “And, no, we don’t keep stock. We bring in cars on order.”

Karitsa is perhaps the loneliest saleswoman in Greece. In a country ravaged by six straight years of recession and record unemployment, car sales have taken a thrashing, with even shipowners and other plutocrats uncharacteristically reluctant to be seen parading their wealth.

The collapse of the car market has become emblematic of hardship, as Greeks endure some of the most biting austerity measures enforced in modern times.

Nearly four years into the nation’s debt crisis, new vehicles registered with the transport ministry up to last month this year dropped by an unprecedented 80 percent from the same seven months in 2008, according to the Association of Motor Vehicle Importers Representatives.

During those months in 2008, more than 187,000 passenger cars were registered (12 of them Ferraris, and more than 300 of them Porsches). That compares with the total for this year of just under 37,000 — none of them a Ferrari, although there were half a dozen Porsches.

“Over the past decades average passenger car registrations for only the first six months of the year have been more than 125,000,” association general manger Dimitris Patsios said.

With GDP down by more than 20 percent since 2008 — the single biggest drop in an advanced Western economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s — it was “more than apparent ... that luxury car sales have long since collapsed,” he said.

In the 1980s, cars became the ultimate status symbol for Greece’s middle class, who had long been prevented from enjoying them by exorbitant levies.

In the easy years when banks ensured that newly minted euro credit was plentiful and cheap, most families had at least two.

Dealing with them since the crisis has not been easy — either for owners or officials. Transport ministry officials say nearly half of the 5.5 million cars in circulation — including about 700,000 vehicles owned by the state — have not been insured, or have failed to pass tests by the transport ministry in the past three years.

A growing number of Greeks, desperate to avoid increasingly expensive taxes and fuel costs — duties on high-end cars have risen dramatically since the country received its first rescue funds from the EU and the IMF — have sought to offload their luxury cars by exporting them.

“Total exports, for all kinds of cars, have [risen] from 3,035 cars in 2010 to 22,053 in 2012,” Patsios said, adding that runaway duties on super cars had effectively “eliminated demand” for them.

The vast majority of vehicles are believed to have ended up in neighboring Albania, a buyer’s delight for second-hand and stolen cars, and Georgia.

“Those who thought they were rich and bought Porsche Cayennes for 60,000 euros [US$80,300] are now selling them for around 16,000 euros through middlemen to countries like Georgia,” said Christos Savvides, a self-confessed lover of cars who turned to driving a cab when his electronics job ended with the crisis.